Southern Literary Fiction

In 1788, Thomas Kendall, a naïve 19-year-old sentenced to transportation for burglary, finds himself bound for Sydney Town and a new life in the wild and lawless land beneath the Southern Cross. Thomas fathers a dynasty that will last more than 200 years. His descendants play their part in the forging of a nation, but greed and prejudice see an irreparable rift in the family which will echo through the generations. It is only at the dawn of the new millennium - as an old journal lays bare a terrible secret - that the family can finally reclaim its honour....

In 1788, Thomas Kendall, a naive nineteen-year-old sentenced to transportation for burglary, finds himself bound for Sydney Town in the penal colony of New South Wales. Discarding allegiance to the country that has disowned him, Thomas, an honest man at heart, seizes a second chance and begins a new life in the wild and lawless land beneath the Southern Cross. Thomas Kendall fathers a dynasty that will last beyond 200 years.

County Sheriff Brody Hayes is in the midst of a missing person's call - for a five-month-old baby. Deep in the mountains of his hometown, Bowie, Wyoming, Brody's desperate search for the helpless child through a worsening snowstorm leads him on an even greater journey - one through his memories of his childhood, his brother, his son, and a life for himself that he thought was lost.

'Truly extraordinary books are rare, and this is one of them' – Roddy Doyle 'His [Dominic Hofman] performance is terrific: variously wry, poignant and thoughtful as he imbues Jim with the humanity and agency denied to him by Twain' – The Guardian, Audiobook of the Week James is a profound...

Flannery O’Connor’s astonishing and haunting first novel is a classic of 20th-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a 22-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his innate, desperate faith. He falls under the spell of a “blind” street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Hazel founds The Church of God Without Christ but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God.

William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853), the first novel written by an African American, was published in London while Brown was still legally regarded as property within the borders of the United States. The novel was inspired by the story of Thomas Jefferson's purported sexual relationship with his slave Sally Hemings. Brown fictionalizes the stories of Jefferson's mistress, daughters, and granddaughters, all of whom are slaves in order to demythologize the dominant U.S. cultural narrative celebrating Jefferson's America as a nation of freedom and equality for all.

A novel of psychological suspense about an idyllic community rocked by a serial killer—and a dark secret. “A stellar achievement, a book that unspools like a dark-toned movie in the reader’s mind.”—The Wall Street Journal (One of the Best Mysteries of the Year) Detective Ben Wade has...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “A big sweeping novel of friendship and marriage” (The Washington Post) by the celebrated author of The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini Leopold Bloom King has been raised in a family shattered—and shadowed—by tragedy. Lonely and adrift, he...

It was hell's season, and the air smelled of burning children.... With “one of the most arresting first sentences in contemporary writing” (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution), Robert McCammon unfurls his visionary masterpiece of survival, redemption, and the astonishing transformations love...

Since 1944, when she published her first story, Elizabeth Spencer has been acclaimed as a writer of short fiction in the great tradition of Welty, Chopin, and Mansfield. The Southern Woman: New and Selected Fiction, her first collection in almost fifteen years, again makes available the author's most masterful stories and novellas, including "The Light in the Piazza" and publishes more than ten new stories for the first time.

"The tension in Hart’s story never lets up, and you’ll find yourself unable to break away — disc after disc (or page after page) — long past your bedtime." -- NJ.com This program includes a letter read by the author “We the unwilling, led by the unqualified to kill the unfortunate, die...

From “a highest-order storyteller of Southern noir” (Electric Literature), a queer coming-of-age novel about addiction, belonging, and loving a place that doesn't always love you back. When sixteen-year-old Shae meets Cam, who is new to their small town in West Virginia, she thinks she has...

A haunting, "exquisitely written" novel that explores the true costs of tradition, gun ownership, masculinity, and Southern mythmaking through the lens of an accidental shooting that reverberates across generations (Fiona McFarlane, author of The Night Guest).​ Rachel Ruskin never intended to...

Harper Lee beschwört den Zauber und die Poesie einer Kindheit im tiefen Süden der Vereinigten Staaten: Die Geschwister Scout und Jem wachsen im Alabama der 1930er Jahre auf. Jäh bricht die Wirklichkeit in ihre behütete Welt ein, als ihr Vater, der Anwalt Atticus Finch, einen wegen Vergewaltigung angeklagten Schwarzen verteidigt. Finch lehrt seine Kinder Verständnis und Toleranz, allen Anfeindungen und Angriffen ihrer "ehrbaren" Mitbürger zum Trotz.

"Great, near-future sci-fi...A propulsive, character-driven thriller...I really love this book."—Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble and Magic for Beginners In the spirit of Station Eleven and California, award-winning novelist Holly Goddard Jones offers a literary spin on the dystopian...

A "prophetic, propulsive" tale of one mysterious, messianic child with untold powers who draws three desperate souls into acts of mercy and mayhem. (Scott Blackburn) An old woman, riddled with dementia, walks off into the woods in the middle of the night. A light in the wood draws her to a...

1923 in Midland, Texas, and Miss Dara falls in love with her best friend - who also happens to be a girl. Terrified, Miss Dara takes a job at Sugar Land Prison for men, hoping to keep her secret attractions under lock and key. Once there, she befriends inmate and soon-to-be legendary blues singer Leadbelly, who sings his way out (true story) - but only after he makes her promise to free herself from her own prison. Sugar Land is a triumphant, beautiful debut novel about the heart’s refusal to be denied what the heart wants.

It was hell's season, and the air smelled of burning children.... With “one of the most arresting first sentences in contemporary writing” (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution), Robert McCammon unfurls his visionary masterpiece of survival, redemption, and the astonishing transformations love...

When a popular youth pastor is accused of a grisly crime, MacLaren Yarbrough won't rest until she finds the truth. Her gut instinct tells her Luke Blessed is innocent. Still, how could the dream he had on the night a young woman was murdered depict the crime with such chilling accuracy? As...

In rural North Georgia two decades after the Civil War, 13-year-old Lulu Hurst reaches high into her father's bookshelf and pulls out an obscure book, The Truth of Mesmeric Influence. Deemed gangly and undesirable, Lulu wants more than a lifetime of caring for her disabled baby brother, Leo, with whom she shares a profound and supernatural mental connection.